There is absolutely no doubt that the horrendous fire season in the western half of the United States is directly attributable to human-caused climate change, and not to either fairy-tale terrorists or a failure to sweep the forest floors. Intensification of seasons, with shifting rainfall patterns and extremes of temperature, have made for a whole series of nightmare events in the West over the last decade. And that’s even when there are not increasingly common thunderstorm blasting the scenery with tens of thousands of fire-starting bolts.
Still, just knowing the root cause of the life-threatening fires doesn’t help when it comes to fighting them. Something that would help: Predictions. Knowing when fires might start, the areas that are most threatened, and achieving greater accuracy in determining wildfire risks would help to allocate resources, plan budgets, and understand where fires are going, not just right now, but over the coming years.
But is it really possible to pin down potential fires with the kind of accuracy that allows weather forecasters to protect people against tornadoes and hurricanes? New models using everything from satellite imagery to supercomputers are making it more possible for researchers to not just track existing fires, but plan for the future. They’re also offering some suggestions how fires might be reduced, including some that seem surprising.
As research in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Science details, fire predictions are making great advances—not least of all because they have to. The series of horrific fires that have struck everywhere from California suburbs to Yellowstone Park and the Canadian wilderness has turned improving modeling of fire potential into a emergency.
Adding complexity to the models is not just looking at the mixture of young and old forests, and the increasing proximity of human constructions to dense forests, but … fires. As in, previous fires. Areas swept over in previous fire seasons create clearings in which a whole new mix of plants spring up. Initially, these can be readily flammable grasslands. If those areas avoid being burned again, in a few years they produce shrub-heavy edge communities—neither grasslands nor forest—that can have some of the greatest species diversity in the area. The large regions of previously burned over forests and their grassy / shrubby diverse mix of vegetation can then turn into paths along which new fires can race with alarming ease, connecting other areas of forest as well as make modeling fire behavior extremely difficult.
As fires can set up the conditions that make it harder to fight new fires, they can also create conditions for simply more fires. When forests burn, they release huge amounts of carbon. Even though some of that carbon is recaptured as those areas are converted into grasslands or shrublands, the amount of carbon held in those areas is still far less than what was in the forest to begin with. A complete recapture of the released carbon could take decades, even centuries. But since these areas become likely targets for fresh fire corridors, the process of carbon-capture can be short circuited again and again: Climate change leads to fires, that feed into climate change, that initiates more fires, that generates more climate change, that … and so on.
As the planet warms, so does the threat of fire. Scientists looking at predictions of where fires are going see the chances of conflagration marching north, with ever greater chances for increased fires that extend into Canada and Alaska. Last year already bought a series of huge fires to Siberia, as well as a number of large fires in Alaska. In the near future, these fires could sweep the vast boreal forest—the taiga— that wraps around the northern reaches of the planet. It’s the greatest non-tropical forest on the planet … and also one of the greatest sinks of carbon that could be released as fires expand their reach. By mid-century, wildfires in Canada and Alaska could be releasing as much carbon as the entire nation of Canada does now through the consumption of fossil fuels.
One thing that researchers have turned up is that current fire control models … don’t. Don’t control fire, that is. A 2019 study using a computer model bolstered with the latest data looked at forests in Grand Teton National Park over a span that included three decades of real world data and then took projections another eighty years into the future. They looked at what managers in the area are doing now, suppressing the majority of lightning-caused wildfires, and compared it with a scenario in which more fires were allowed to burn naturally. The result was … the same. Both models predicted an amazing 1,700% increase in area burned going forward. By the end of the century, over a third of the forest in the area will simply be gone—and even then the potential for fire keeps increasing as new grasslands make more uncontrolled fires likely.
But there are ways to address the threat. Researchers are gathering not just imagery and species data on forests, but real-time data from fire fighters as well as information from forestry experts on the ground. They’re looking at plants that might be able to establish themselves in the wake of repeated fires that could represent a carbon sink, and which might also limit the possibility of additional fires. Matching computer models and real world experience, they’re beginning to get a handle on fire control practices—from encouraging the growth of certain species, to allowing some areas to burn—that could establish forests both more resistant to huge fires, and better able to hold down carbon.
To achieve this may actually require converting what grows on the land … and oddly enough, the solution could be more forests. Using seed and saplings to convert grassland / shrublands to black spruce forest could help to undo the impact of more frequent fires. It would both capture more carbon, and burn less readily than the non-forested scars from past fires. This would help prevent these areas from becoming corridors that spread fire to more forests. Rather than sweep forest floors, the solution may be to create more of them.
The problem with this is … there’s no money in it. Widespread reseeding is “unlikely in the near future … because they are not considered economically important.”
Those facing this season of fires might disagree.
